S Kay's work was featured in issue 9 of Reality Hands. You can read it here. We talked about that piece and Twitterfiction and their current projects. You can find S Kay on tumblr and twitter and in print.

RH: What was your approach to structuring the work?

S. Kay: The story is Twitterfiction, so it had to fit into the constraints of140 characters. Aside from that I applied a twist resolution.

RH: What effect do you want the text to have on the reader?

S. Kay: I want the text to linger and cause the reader to think about thesituation in the story and what happens to people in that place.

RH: How does your text reflect or reference the world outside the text?

S. Kay: It references hashtags, which are a huge and complex world linkingmillions of people in discussions.

RH: Publishing on twitter is so immediate, like there is no barrierbetween the initial thought and pressing that quill in a box. What'syour editing process like? Do you even edit at all, or is the mainhurdle the character count?

S. Kay: I write Twitterfiction using a locked account for first drafts, so it's not like the usual Twitter experience with followers. I don't publish when I write it, I save it to submit to publications or become part of a longer document.

I do edit stories and will usually let them sit overnight.

RH: The irony is thick in this story, and the subject matter is dark. Doyou work in themes like suicide and alienation often? Does the workprovide catharsis for you as the author?

S. Kay: My stories sometimes give me catharsis but this is not one of those times. I chose suicide as a theme because I volunteer in the area and want people to think about it. I don't write about it often but sometimes do. It's important we address it.

RH: Do you feel like your work is tied to the Twitter platform? Twitter is making a lot of changes--including rumors of increased character count. Is there a threat to your work because you do not control the means of distribution?

S. Kay: It's not so much the means of distribution for me, as I only submit work to a few Twitter-based zines, it's the means of production that is at stake if Twitter changes its character count. I write drafts using a Twitter account and that constraint.

RH: What are you working on that readers should be looking out for?

S. Kay: A collection of tweet-sized stories about robots in an app is one goal of mine. I'm trying to find a developer.

I'm also writing a history of Twitterfiction that is part memoir and part compilation. I recently had my 300th microfiction published and this will celebrate the best of that work.